'Crime Story' Cast Isn't Meant To Be 'Liked'

August 19, 1986|By Jay Bobbin, Tribune TV Log

To risk understatement, Michael Mann is one busy person.

The executive producer of Miami Vice and director of the recently released feature film Manhunter, Mann now has yet another project under his wing: the new NBC series Crime Story, which is scheduled to premiere on Thursday, Sept. 18, with a two-hour pilot. The show will chronicle organized crime in America by tracing several characters from the early 1960s into the 1980s in a serialized format.

Complaints were lodged by critics and viewers alike about the 1985-86 episodes of Miami Vice, suggesting that the stories and general style were becoming lax. Mann counters by explaining that directing Manhunter, which kept him on location in North Carolina for several months and away from the Miami Vice set, was ''a whole different kind of an occupation than executive producing, which is a lot of design work in the abstract. Looking after two television shows is not a problem for me; that's easy. It's when you're directing, which is a totally consuming thing, that it gets pretty rough.''

The pilot for Crime Story was finished considerably late, so that advertisers and critics were unable to preview it during the summer, unlike other fall starters that have already been sampled. However, many of the characters -- including a Chicago police lieutenant (played by Dennis Farina, a former real-life cop) and his main target, a slick young mobster (Anthony Denison) -- reflect a hard edge that is uncommon for continuing characters in series TV.

''I don't think people tune in to guys they like,'' Mann said. ''I don't think 'like' is the operative word that makes for a hero in television. There's 'admire,' there's 'fantasy fulfillment,' there's a whole spectrum of reasons. There's also comedy; I don't think you 'like' Don Rickles, yet he's great. He comes from a tradition of humor like W.C. Fields', in which the other person was the victim -- as opposed to the Laurel-Hardy sense of humor -- so I don't think 'like' is the connection between an audience and a main character.''